North Bay’s original rail ‘commuter’ a fine model as SMART prepares to launch

Given the recent dust-up over train schedules, soaring housing prices and other regional stresses, it seems to be a good time for a happy story from days gone by.

A little travelin’ music, maestro, if you please.

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NEVER MIND THAT we have to reach back 120 years to start at the beginning. The story is worth a bit of time travel.

It’s about Sonoma County’s first “commuter,” a man who earned the distinction even before the word was in common usage. He was Oliver Clay Hopkins, born in 1872. By the time be was 20, he was one.

I have told his story before but not in this decade. In light of the shifting schedules and connections and dire predictions about the return of the passenger train, it seems a good time to tell it again.

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Hopkins began what would become his life’s journey in 1893 as a courier - more likely called a messenger in those years.

He carried all kinds of documents from his Petaluma hometown to San Francisco in the workweek - things as important as bank notes, legal papers, merchants’ orders and housewives’ shopping lists - and brought the responses back to Petaluma.

It was an important job, favored by young men of the late 19th century.

In 1933, celebrating a life of train travel, he told a reporter for the Petaluma Argus Courier all about his own courier experience, remembering such cargo as opera tickets, compressed yeast and “plaid sewing silk.”

A friend wrote: “He was an institution … Petaluma was hardly buffalo country but it wasn’t a suburb either. At first, friends and neighbors, tied to their chickens, would ask him to make small purchases for them. By degrees it became a business. I’m not sure what commission was charged but it helped cover the travel expense for the day.”

His daily trips were made by train and ferry - the only way to get there in those times.

He built his round-trip messenger business for a dozen years before selling it after the ’06 earthquake to open an insurance brokerage in The City. (Do the Millennials still use that term?)

He gave up his courier’s pouch, but not his mode of travel.

As his great-granddaughter, Virginia Strom-Martin, suggested when I talked with her about him in 2004, he had come to appreciate the joy of train travel and a short sea voyage.

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UNTIL 1939, through rapidly changing times - from the Wright Brothers and the Model T, in the Jazz Age and the Great Depression - Hopkins caught the 7:15 a.m. Northwestern Pacific “down” train in Petaluma Monday through Friday.

It took him to the ferry - first Tiburon, then Sausalito. He disembarked in San Francisco and walked to his office in the Financial District, arriving about 9:15 with a stop at Podesta & Baldocchi for a fresh white “buttonhole” carnation, which was, according to his great-granddaughter, “his signature piece.”

Work done, his boutonniere still fresh and fragrant, he put on his hat, walked to the 5:15 p.m. ferry and caught the “up” train to Petaluma’s depot which was, until 1914, a wood structure built for the original SF&NP (San Francisco and North Pacific) line.

With ownership of the NWP (Northwestern Pacific) the depot was replaced by the Mission Revival building on Lakeville Street which is now Petaluma’s Visitors’ Center.

From either one, it was a short walk from the Hopkins’ home at 24 Seventh Street in Petaluma. On long summer days, Hopkins was home in time to harvest fresh corn for the family’s dinner in his backyard garden.

He never learned to drive a car.

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AFTER THE FIRST ?25 years or so of this schedule, “Ollie” as he was known to friends, fellow passengers and nearly every employee of NWP, found himself in the newspapers. He was something of a Bay Area celebrity.

Happily, many of these clippings have been saved and are treasured possessions of great-granddaughter Strom-Martin, a Duncans Mills resident and former three-term assemblywoman from Sonoma County.

A reporter caught up with him in 1918, waxing poetic over Ollie’s travels “… in winter and summer, rain and shine, sunshine and shadow … with a smile for everybody, and a good word, too.”

In 1929, his friend and fellow Elks Lodge member, Herbert Slater, who did double-duty as state senator and a Press Democrat reporter, proclaimed it “something of a record for the Commuters’ Club - ?38 miles to San Francisco, then 38 miles back to Petaluma five days a week, ?300 days a year … for, 36 years, count ’em!”

Needless to say, the ferry crew knew him well. They were even known to wait a few minutes for him when the train was late.

And the railroad men were even more watchful.

On the occasion of the 40th year of Ollie’s travels, Art Newburgh of the Petaluma Argus Courier, wrote:

“It is said that if he failed to show up and the train men did not know that he was to be off-schedule for the day, they would hold the train at the depot and maybe telephone to his home to see if he overslept. He knows everybody who travels and everybody knows him.”

Everybody, indeed.

It was the San Francisco Call, I believe (it’s hard to identify some of the clips) that reported, in verse, on his hat habit. Dapper Ollie apparently favored a straw hat, a “skimmer,” in summer months and may have lost one overboard off the deck of the ferry in a brisk wind.

The details are lost to the ages, but we do learn that thereafter he wore a special style made of - or at least, lined with - cork. So it would float.

“It sails, never fails, floats like pails and finds it way to the Ferry Building.”

I wish I knew that whole story.

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IN 1937, HOPKINS turned his insurance business over to his daughter, Virginia Strom (our Virginia’s grandmother), ending a 44-year journey. He died in 1940, at age 68. His old friend Sen. Slater, wrote in memoriam:

“He became so familiar with the route between Petaluma and the Bay that, he laughingly admitted he had counted the railroad ties so often that he knew when replacements were made.

“On the trains in his travels, he came in contact with thousands of people. No matter where he turned he met friends and exchanged smiles and cheery words.”

Hold that thought as the launch of SMART draws nigh.